Andrew Stanton’s “John Carter” trailer

We don’t usually post trailers for live action films but have, when time to time, one is closely related to our field (Brad Bird’s Mission Impossible, Cameron’s Avatar and Disney’s The Muppets come to mind). Pixar’s Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E) has been working on a live action adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Princess of Mars for the past few years, and the trailer has just been unveiled. There’s plenty of CG character animation involved (did Pixar animators do it?) and lots of action. The movie will be released in March – and I’m crossing my fingers for its success.

god i hope this is good but i’m not psyched about anything i’ve seen yet…
: (
i hope stanton delivers.

N W Smith

This is SOOOOOO much better than an earlier trailer/sneak-peek that’s been on YouTube for awhile. I think the problem before was that most of the CGI/SPX hadn’t been added to the raw footage yet. It also tended to emphasize the action-hero elements of Dejah Thoris, rather than the fact that she’s supposed to be drop-dead gorgeous with oak-leaf cluster.

LOVE the fliers, too – I was wondering if they were going to go with the “Flash Gordon”-esque stylings from the original illustrations, but these are more than acceptable.

As for the Led Zeppelin playing the background . . . may not be working for me.

Michel Van

is this Disney answer to AVATAR ?
i think yes
and for wat i see (in trailer) is a true adaptation of Burroughs work
let see on march if Andrew Stanton made again a master piece

Visually cool. It looks like Stanton has a great eye for the world. I’m hoping the actor playing Carter brings some energy/humor/swagger, to the character that isn’t showing up in these early trailers. It may be too much to ask to slow down for those character moments in a trailer like this.

Mat H

John Carter OF MARS. Goddamnit..OF MARS. Such a cooler name.

droosan

I would have also accepted this as plain JOHN CARTER with the sub-title: A PRINCESS OF MARS.

If this franchise gets stretched into a trilogy, perhaps this film could get that distinction .. sort of like how the 1977 STAR WARS gets referred to as EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE these days, even though that wasn’t its original title.

I do feel much much better about this movie than I had after the previous ‘teaser’ trailer, at least.

It’s so BUSY. I know the current trend is to jam as many moving objects into a frame as your software allows, so that later the fans can freeze frame and study it, but that’s not how the average human views a motion picture. I was getting dizzy trying to focus on ,er, ANYTHING, but it was just giving me a headache. I hope there are a least a couple of scenes in the movie where they slow it down a little so your brain can absorb it.

Priory

Watch the first teaser then, way more calm and collected.

Steve Pissocra

Read all the books in the series back in art schoolâ€¦ 30 years ago. My buds and I used to have fantasy casting sessions. I’ve been waiting for this movie for a long time.

I remember John Carter as a man of valor, honor and a very dry wit. I hope those qualities come through in the film. Anxious to take my ten-year-old son to see it.

Wow there seems to be a lot of Stanton apologists here because seriously there is nothing I have seen so far that elevates this above:

Prince of Persia
Cowboys vs. Aliens
Conan the Barbarian
Attack of the Clones

I see nothing of the Frazetta machismo and the colors are so drab it’s making me fall asleep.

Sadly, as much as I despise Avatar, they would’ve done MUCH better ripping that movie off than at best apparently neutering the source material and at worst making the same generic sci-fi desert epic that we’ve all gotten tired of.

John A

Sadly, none of this comes close to Frazetta, who just about nailed the entire look of Burrough’s world. It’s all too synthetic, nothing looks like it even COULD be real. This resembles Star Wars, and not the good ones either.

Bud

It looks so cheap and generic! Is this a SyFy movie of the week? The acting is so bad, and the cg work looks like leftovers of a video game from the late eighties. I bet Disney stockholders will be very upset when this tanks.

Looks *extremely* similar to the gladiator scene at the end of Attack of the Clones.

Chelsea

I thought this too, but I think it’s just an unfortunate coincidence, or perhaps I’m just hoping. I wouldn’t put it past the people who created this trailer to try and cut something that looks like a Star Wars film, because everyone knows Star Wars fans are starving to find a movie that feels like Star Wars again.

People are making the same comments about this being an ‘Avatar rip-off’ already. I think that’s a little much… mostly because, again, I think this trailer is TRYING to remind everyone of these movies, because they were successful. It’s unfortunate that the trailer doesn’t seem to play to any strength of this movie…

I don’t think this is a good trailer. It doesn’t tell me anything about this movie except “ALIENS. SPACESHIPS. NAME OF FAMOUS SERIES. DISNEY. EPIC MUSIC. SPACE BATTLE.” but I’m really hoping that all of that is just due to a bad trailer and that it doesn’t accurately reflect the source material.

Clutch

The book was written 100 years ago. Where do you think Lucas got the idea from?

John A

You are correct sir, Lucas cribbed a lot of concepts, and names too, from Burroughs. But he isn’t alone. Almost all 20th century science fiction from Flash Gordon to Stargate has borrowed elements of Edgar’s pulp novels.

Foss

Reminds me more of “Dune” than anything. This is a vast leap over the earlier promos and Stanton’s animation expertise pays off with the CG. The biggest problem with this footage is that it dies whenever the leading man is onscreen. He has all the presence of a brunet Fabio. Where is the margarine?

Lots of busy CGI stuff and special effects, and all the Alien characters and props still look too CGI that the human characters stick out too much(it’s like humans in a CGI world).
They shouldn’t focus too much on cool effects and how good they can get in CGI!
CGI is not a solution, it should be a tool and support for the movies.
I like how they did it in “District 9”, a good example where they used CGI in a good way to tell the story. I had the feeling the Aliens and ships really were there, everything fitted perfectly together!

Anyways, it still looks pretty good and looks very interesting! I’m going to see this movie, since I’m a big Science fiction fan!:3

Pedro Nakama

Soundtrack by Led Zeppelin?

Gray64

Interestingly, the earlier trailer seemed…sadder, more elegaic, with “My Body is a Cage” playing over the images, and a lot of the early focus apparently on the death and rebirth aspects of the story. It seemed different and distictive, whereas this trailer feels more generic action-movie-ish.
I have high hopes for this. Stanton is a great director, and he has Michael Chabon as one of his script-writers. Hopefully this’ll be something special.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t this film originally conceived as an animated Pixar feature? I remember it being announced as a Pixar film several years back, and then suddenly it shifted to Disney. Weird…

Bud

No. It was never announced as a Pixar feature. Fan sites may have confused the issue, but it was ALWAYS a Disney film. Always.

Skip

Andrew Stanton has proven him self time and time again. I will see the movie in the theatre and in 3D. Based on Stanton’s track record, I will reserve judgment until the end credits. I will also do the same thing for Brad Bird when I go to see Ghost Protocal.

Much less interesting than the first trailer, which I was quite excited by. But I remain curious, since I suspect this Led Zeppelin edit is deliberately misleading.

I don’t know John Carter from Adam, but it’s unfortunate this so closely resembles Attack of the Clones, since I must assume that movie ripped the whole ‘insect amphitheater’ deal from the books?

Bob

The music is wretched and the look uncharismatic. Bleahâ€¦. I think the only way to do this material would’ve been to go retro-futuristic. If it looked like Flash Gordon or a pulp cover come to life, it would’ve had color and vibrancy. This is simply [insert generic sci-fi junk name] tarted up with special effects. Also â€¦ shouldn’t the leading man and leading lady be slightly more interesting?

The first, perhaps the insurmountable error was the abbreviated title. The name of Burrough’s book is “John Carter of Mars.” THAT is a TITLE that SELLS. Who would know—within the age demographic that this movie needed to sell to—that John Carter is today anything but a bland name presumable picked out of a telephone book and promising nothing, especially high adventure?
Second problem is the ho-hum obviousness and indiscriminate usuage of CGI. An audience no longer feels it is watching exceptional humans performing daring feats. At its current technologicval level, CGI is as old-hat and yawn inducing and chop socky movies.